A new contributor to Biodivertido

So, I’ve decided to become a blogger. But Javier said that on my quest to riches, I needed to first give a quick introduction. Here you go.

My name is Andrew Hill. I am working on my PhD in Rob Guralnick’s lab in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Colorado. I began working here almost 3 years ago on a project to reconstruct the evolution and spread of influenza through time and over geography (see here or here). Like the influenza itself, my interests have mutated rapidly. Most of my work now involves at least one of three informatics subtypes; biodiversity informatics, phyloinformatics, or (I’m not sure people say this) visual informatics. I have ongoing research on the evolution of influenza, as well as a handful of smaller genomics and bioinformatics projects, and am just now starting work for the OBIS-USA project.

As for my role at Biodivertido, I don’t know yet. Rob, Walter Jetz, and EOL just put on an excellent workshop in Chicago that gave me, Tim, and Javier the opportunity to talk about our interests and coordinate some of our efforts on a couple of new projects. We will likely be giving you more details about some of those in a few hours. So don’t go far from your RSS feed.

For now, all I can say is that I’m extremely excited to be working with these guys and will hopefully be contributing cool things very soon.